Description

• Achieving exascale performance at the end of this decade or the beginning of next decade is essential for progress in science – including progress on problems of major societal impact (such as weather or environmental impact); essential for the continued certification of the nuclear stockpile; and essential to our national security.
• The rate of advance in the performance of CMOS technology is slowing down and is likely to plateau mid next decade. No alternative technology is ready for deployment.
• Therefore, achieving exascale performance in 20 years may not be significantly cheaper than achieving it in 10 years – even if we could afford the wait.
• It is essential (for continued progress in solving major societal problems, nuclear stockpile, security) to have a sustained growth in supercomputer performance and sustained advantage over competitors and potential enemies.
• To achieve this continued growth, we need research on (a) using CMOS more efficiently and (b) accelerating the development and deployment of a CMOS replacement.
• (a) is (or should be) the focus of exascale research: How to get significantly higher compute efficiencies from a fixed transistor or energy budget. (b) is essential to explore, even if not for exascale in 10 years, as it will be necessary to continue beyond exascale.